Tides (or "The Joke You Haven't Yet Told Me")

"F***ing poets; always talking about the moon!" --Her response when I said, "I wrote a poem about you. Well, not really about you; about the moon."

Over-ripe apple of moon,
delicious w/ sin,
hangs just above treeline & rooftop
big as lust & laughing
at the joke you haven’t yet told me.

Driving alongside
painted fields of snow,
the loneliness of a radio tower,
the memory of a murder of crows
funereal in a vacant lot;
it occurs to me:

In your five years
of living in the City,
you may have rarely been able
to see the moon this low,
& therefore this big,
this mythic & blood-full

So I check to see if you are watching it
from where you are tonight,
So, together, we can feel
its blood-paint on our faces
and you are

And somehow I knew that you would be.
And you tell me that you learned a new joke today.
And I can see that the moon has already heard you tell it.

Its laughter: an ocean swelling against the coastline,
breaking over rocks, then receding
into another poem.

Reviews

[Ed Hart]

how nice to find a worthy poet! who could comment? except to say, you don't climb that mountain without getting some bruises...